Early movie artifact comes to light

Stained glass sign for the Kinemacolor Theatre was found in ex-restaurant site

 

A circa-1913 stained glass window that was missing for decades is now in the
possession of a dealer in architectural antiques

By JOHN MACKIE

Vancouver Sun

   A unique artifact from the dawn of the movie age has sur­faced at a Vancouver antique store — a stained glass sign for the Kinemacolor Theatre.

Kinemacolor was a primitive colour film process that was all the rage in Europe just before the First World War.

   Its North American debut was at Madison Square Garden in New York in 1909, and on Feb. 24, 1913, Canada's first Kinemacolor Theatre opened at 603 Granville, at Dunsmuir.

   But it failed to ignite Vancou­ver's masses, and by 1914, the the­atre name had been changed to the Colonial. The Colonial lasted until 1972, when it was torn down to make way for the Pacific Cen­tre Mall/Block 42 development downtown.

   The kinemacolor process died out by 1920, a victim of a patent lawsuit in England and the inven­tion of technicolor in 1917. Most kinemacolor films have been lost, and any kinemacolor memorabil­ia is extremely rare.

   The Kinemacolor Theatre stained glass was recently pur­chased by Eric Cohen of Archi­tectural Antiques.

   It had been hanging on the wall at the former Keg restaurant location at Thurlow and Alberni after mysteriously vanishing from the Colonial in 1972.

   Theatre legend Hugh Pickett said the huge semi-circular stained glass sign (which is 13 feet wide and seven feet high) was originally installed over the entrance to the old theatre.

   "I can remember it very well, because when the theatre was sold, they promised me four pieces of stained glass," Pickett said.

   "The night before it was to be taken out, somebody went in there and took it."

   Two oval stained glass sky-lights featuring the kinemacolor torch logo also turned up at the old Keg. Cohen purchased them as well, and is selling them for $15,000 for the pair. He hasn't put a price tag on the Kinemacolor Theatre sign.

   How they wound up at the Keg is a mystery. Retired architect Bill Dunn helped design the Keg on Thurlow in 1977. He said most of the furnishings, which included elaborate oak bookshelves and oak wall panels, cam' from a 19th-century apothecary (drug-store) in Minneapolis and were purchased at auction in Los Angeles.

   Dunn thinks the stained glass came from the collection of then landlord John Adams, but has no idea how Adams obtained it. He thinks the restaurant furnishings may have cost about $100,000 in 1977.

   The Keg moved to a bigger location across the street last fall, but most of the furnishings were left behind. A carpenter hap­pened by when a demolition crew was ripping out the oak walls and some stained glass, which was going to b: thrown out.

   He asked if he could have it, and contacted Cohen, who bought a couple of stained-glass windows and a garage filled with century-old oak panels

Cohen then went down to the old Keg to poke around He spotted the Kinemacolor Theatre sign, bought it, and assembled a crew of six to take it down off the wall (he estimates it weighs 600 to 700 pounds.)

   "It was stuck right up o the top of the ceiling," he said. I walked to the top of a 17 foot ladder, and I was standing knocking a metal pin out to release the window."

   The Kinemacolor sign is one of the few remnants of Vancouver's silent movie era, when theatres had colourful name like the Cameraphone, the Bijou and the Maple Leaf. A couple old the­atres still remain from the era, like the Pantages on Hastings street and the Edison now the Paramount in New Westminster, but finding an original sign is nothing short of miraculous.

   In fact, English kinemacolor expert Luke McKerna has nev­er heard of a kinemacolor stained glass sign. He thinks it may have been commissioned by the the­atre owner, who probably thought that having the only colour movies in town would be a gold mine.

   Kinemacolor was invented by English cinematographer George Albert Smith, and marketed by American entrepreneur Charles Urban. Film was run through a projector at 32 frames per sec­ond, twice the normal speed, and then filtered through red and green coloured lenses to produce "the world's wonders in nature's colours."

   Vancouver's Kinemacolor The­atre was located in the Van Horne building, which was built in 1889. It opened with a program of Wild Birds of Asia, Doctor's Blind Child, The Note in a Shirt, Two of a Kind, and Niagara Falls, which a Vancouver World writer dubbed "the finest reel ever put on a screen." A nine-piece orchestra accompanied the short films, and a baritone named George C. Temple "delighted the audience with some of the old songs." Later, the theatre added a $10,000 organ to accompany the silent movies.

   Pickett has fond memories of the theatre when it was called the Colonial. He got his first job there in 1929.

   "I'll tell you something tragic," says Pickett, who turns 88 in a few weeks. "My first job there, I had to go into a room in the basement of the building, which had been condemned by the fire department because it was full of paper. All the old three sheets [movie posters], one sheets, 24 sheets, stills, everything was in that room. I had to take it out in barrels and take it out into the lane and burn it.

   "Can you imagine what it would be worth today? A one sheet of Marlene Dietrich in a picture that she made early on in her career sold for $300,000 at Parke Burnett [gallery] in New York. I had no interest in them then. Good God, now I've had had them all. It was the whole history of the Colonial theatre. It took about three weeks to burn it all"

­   The Kinemacolor Theatre sign isn't the only piece of historic stained glass Cohen has for sale. When Mark James renovated the 1913 Lotus Hotel, he sold Archi­tectural Antiques several finely detailed pieces of stained glass. The old stained glass window from the Lotus bar, for example, is now for sale for $5,500.

   Cohen is now trying to piece together the oak bookcase from the Minneapolis apothecary, which had been disassembled. The centrepiece of the bookcase features carved griffins, mythical beasts that look like lions.

   Cohen might have 30 feet of bookcase by the time he's finished.